Review of On Some Faraway Beach: The Life and Times of Brian Eno

T.R.U.E., Week of 7/8, Post #3

David Sheppard-- On Some Faraway Beach

Way back in my last life (or the one before), when I was a cheeky, snotty, solitary rock music critic in Seattle, I was talking to my favorite band in town, The Walkabouts. In part, I'll admit, they were my favorite because everyone else loved Nirvana (me, too) Soundgarden, the Melvins,and Mudhoney (me, those last three, not so much). In part because they wrote a sort of literate, doomy folk-rock that went down just right with November rain over the Sound, and had penned at least a couple near-classics I still say are worth rediscovering, even if the band eventually got self-conscious and relocated to Germany, where they're still beloved.

One night, I ran into Chris Eckman, their singer/guitarist/co-leader. He was so wired, he seemed to have sprung another few inches on his already towering, reedy frame. "Brian Eno just played on our record," he told me.

And that got me so excited, I think I, too, got taller. Don't laugh, you who know (and look down) on me. You didn't know how hobbity I was THEN.

I asked Chris how it had happened.

"He was in the studio next door," Chris said, "and he heard us playing 'Train to Mercy.'" (That, by the way, is one of those songs you all should hear someday). "And he just walked into our studio, and said, 'Let me show you something.' And he went to the keyboard while the song played back. And he just...held down a C. Then, after a while, he added a high E.' Then he said, 'See?' Just do that. But what he'd done was so perfect--it just FILLED the song, just enough...made it BREATHE or something...we asked if we could keep the part he'd just played. He shrugged and left."

That story isn't in David Sheppard's superb and fair-minded On Some Faraway Beach. But there are a thousand others like it. Brian lulling and nagging Robert Fripp into the most majestic,emotionally engaged solos of his long, combative career. Brian yoking a cantankerous, coked-out John Cale to his songs for some of the best records of THAT career. Brian helping Bryan invent Roxy Music, without knowing how to do anything on a musical instrument except loop and smear it with tape decks and a primitive synthesizer. Brian dreaming up ambient music after getting hit by a car.

Gavin Bryars, who has composed two of the most lasting pieces in the contemporary classical music canon--both while he was working somewhere in the vicinity of Eno--contends, in Sheppard's book, that Eno's actual art can only be classified as disappointing, that his ideas are always better than the music that springs from them.

That might be fair. There are Eno records I adore--"Another Green World," "Taking Tiger Mountain...", "Before and After Science," "Discreet Music" (side one, anyway), the 2nd and 4th Ambient releases. But there are lots more Eno productions, things he's touched, that I love than things that bear his name.

As a matter of fact, I'm not sure any one human being has factored in more of the non-literary creative work I love than Brian Eno. In one way or another. And if the majority of his recorded output, like John Cage's, eventually fades, and if his greatest gift has been bringing wild or abstract ideas (only some of them his) to bear on accessible art, he has consistently managed to make the art I love into greater art.

No one I've ever known has played a Middle C better.